Gorbals Mick. It betrayed every single fear and prejudice of the feral, aristocratic English underclass. And it was safe to assume that those who gloried in Michael Martin's nickname had never visited this benighted little district that lies just south and a little bit east of the River Clyde.

We knew that when the children of the southern shires misbehaved, their parents would tell them that their dreams would be haunted by ghouls, hobgoblins and the Gorbals Bogeyman. "Gorbals". It is a word that, when uttered, carries menace and a challenge. In the dark imaginings of the children of the shires, it is a place where the sun does not shine and where birdsong has departed. Where men spend their days working in foundries and their nights in desolate taverns called O'Shaughnessy's or Finbarr's. Babies are abandoned at birth in the Spartan fashion and dogs are eaten. At weekends, people are chibbed. If they are lucky, they may simply be banjoed. The women wear shawls, the burkas of the labouring classes. The old age pension kicks in at 35 and the Styx runs past it.

When some of those Nigels, Quentins and Geoffreys grew up, they still bolted the door at night and trembled at childhood memories of the Gorbals Bogeyman. And they all remember what they were doing on the day the nightmare became reality, 23 October 2000. The day Gorbals Mick stepped out of their dreams, knocked on the door of their House and came in to terrorise them. They formed a support group where they shared their terrors of the night and every month they ventured forth in hoods and fiery crosses to bait and worry the Frankenstein's monster who had now taken residence in the Speaker's chair in the Palace of Westminster.

Last month, their nine-year-long campaign to oust Michael Martin finally ended in victory and, ever since, the air above Westminster has been rent with their braying and their snorting. They had finally killed the beast.

But for those nine years when Martin administered his duties as Speaker of the House effectively and with wisdom, the slab was pulled back off the grass and we saw what class prejudice in the 21st century really looked like. At first, there was merely a grim fascination at the grating sound of a working man's voice. They struggled with the shortened vowels and the distended consonants of this dialect from the Black Lagoon and so they turned to each other and said: "He's not very bright, is he?"

Soon, there were unsourced reports from shadowy figures that Speaker Martin was struggling with the Byzantine procedures of the House. Of course it was all going to end in tears. After all, the chap didn't even have a degree.

Then there were reports of bullying of his staff, who were described as vestigial figures of a hallowed disposition whose only desire had only ever been to serve Merrie Englande for a hearty jug of porter and a suckling pig at Christmas. This uncouth Glaswegian tyrant was allegedly making their lives hell. It was all simply intolerable. And Mrs Martin? Just who did she think she was? Brazenly shopping in Knightsbridge stores and claiming for her taxis. Didn't she know there was a waiting list for noses in the trough and that you had to be proposed and seconded by the men in the velvet smoking jackets?

But they knew their day would come and when the moats, the duckhouses and the trouser-presses were revealed, they seized their chance. As a collection of dreadful little Liberal Democrats and Tory backwoodsmen lined up to condemn him they knew they had him. For Speaker Martin, they all knew, we all knew, simply didn't have the intellectual tools and the quick wit to see off the barbs and the catcalls.

In the end, he made it easy for them simply because he loved this House and its traditions and procedures and he knew that by fighting them he risked opprobrium coming down on all of it. He might also have expected some succour from his leader, a man to whom he had always given loyal and unstinting support. But the stoney stare and the unforgiving jowls told him all he needed to know: that loyalty only works one way in Gordon Brown's inner sanctum.

No matter that he had given all of them a classic opportunity to save themselves last year with commonsense proposals to begin the process of reforming how their expenses worked. They had rejected these and with that their last chance of self-preservation had gone. Now, by falling on him, they knew they could give themselves some respite from the Telegraph's onslaught. Many of his brother MPs even took time off from their day jobs in the boardrooms of private equity firms to turn up and see the fun.

Michael Martin will return to Glasgow with his head held high. For he served his party and his country with distinction. When he left an old Catholic secondary school in 1960, he lacked qualifications, money, help and influential friends. But he still made it to the pinnacle of the British ruling establishment and his constituents in Springburn were proud of him because he still looked like them, talked like them and he was proud to represent them. At the byelection in September, they may yet punish the Labour party for allowing one of their own to twist in the wind before a pack of Tory hyenas.